As mobile terminals, in particular cell phones, have gained more popularity and increased internal memory, a mobile subscriber can now store information and applications in the mobile terminal. Electronic calendars, electronic phonebooks, graphic images, photos, presentation files, etc. are now storable in mobile terminals. In the prior art if a mobile user of a first mobile terminal wants to allow other mobile users (and also any other type of user) to view files on and/or download files from the first mobile terminal, the mobile user must email the files to select other mobile users. This does not allow the other mobile users to browse the files on the first mobile terminal, and choose to view and/or download selected files.
It is necessary to provide some level of security if files are to be viewed and/or downloaded. Authentication initially involves verification of the user's identity. Secure systems must verify, or validate, the user's name, password and location. The use of third-party name services permits the use of a single database to store privileges for users on the local network, as well as for remote users. This helps minimize the number of user databases required to assign privileges such as printer use, server access and remote dial-in access. Authentication for remote access has distinct feature requirements and is more complex than general LAN security.
A number of file discovery and sharing programs are known for use across networks, especially those programs, which permit the sharing of multimedia content. Users connect to a central directory service and upload a list of files that they currently have on their local system, which may be requested by other participants in the directory service. To retrieve files, users send a request for a file to the central directory service, which then connects the requesting user to another user's computer containing that file which computer is also currently online. One known program of this type is Napster, a utility for sharing audio files by manually registering them with a central directory service. Other known programs provide for sharing more general-purpose files. The general term for both programs is “peer-to-peer file sharing service”.
While the processing capability and memory storage of mobile phones continues to increase, there remains a need to conserve mobile resources, particularly memory. For this reason, it is not practical for the mobile to run the standard software file sharing Web server applications (e.g., HTTP, FTP, etc., since for example the widely used Apache Web server would consume too much of the limited resources of the mobile phone). Also, mobile phones currently do not support the operating system software capable of supporting the multi-process requirements of Web servers. For these reasons, it is necessary to equip the mobile phone with skeletal file-sharing software that is capable only of single-user, single-process file sharing. To maintain the simplicity of the mobile-resident software, all file-sharing and remote access mobile phone support is coordinated via a separate Remote File Sharing Server.
One problem in the prior art is that when a first user has an electronic calendar, and when a second user desires to view the calendar, the second user must have the first user check the calendar stored in the first mobile terminal. This can be very inconvenient for the first user. Thus, it is a drawback of the prior art that there is a lack of remote access and file sharing functionality between mobile terminals of mobile subscribers in the network.